I found Katie’s recent post on teaching material culture stimulating, in part because I am in the process of designing a course on the history of urban space in 19th-century Boston that will have its own material culture component, and looking for ideas and suggestions. In my previous life as a journalist I wrote quite a bit about architecture and urban planning, mostly for magazines catering to architects and designers, but I’m finding designing a course on urban space is a pretty different exercise: the course I have in mind is for non-majors, focuses on the past rather than the present, and addresses a much broader ranger of social and ecological issues. I’ve been busy canvassing colleagues and the web for suggestions, in an attempt to anticipate some of the pedagogical problems and solutions I might encounter. I’ve compiled a couple of these issues hoping to hear more about what people’s experiences as students and instructors have been in similar courses.
First, one of the big problems I’ve been warned about concerning teaching the built environment part of the course is the difficulty most students have in distinguishing and chronologically ordering different phases of architecture. This is particularly challenging before the advent of modernism, when in Western cities you have a mishmash of relatively short-lived historical styles (e.g. neo-classicism, Gothic revival, the Italianate style, etc.) In Boston, these styles arrived in overlapping phases and often borrowed elements from one another. It won’t necessarily be clear to most observers, for instance, what distinguishes the pediment of Bullfinch-designed building from that of a more explicitly Greek Revival structure. On top of that, most 19th-century buildings look about equally old to most of us.
One of the solutions I’ve heard for the first problem, visual recognition, is to conduct a field trip (this depends on where the course is being taught, naturally) and ask students to bring along sketchpads and quickly draw the most prominent features of buildings that characterize particular styles. Probably one of the better places to do this in Boston is Copley Square, where just by turning your head you can see examples of Gothic Revival, Italian Renaissance, Modernist, Postmodernist, and Beaux-Arts architecture. Drawing is not something we do a lot of in history courses, but I think it may be worth a shot. Any thoughts?
A second problem, and one that field trips can’t necessarily solve, is conveying the sensory impact of the built environments of the past. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think this is especially essential to understanding the 19th-century city, a place where social distinctions were often predicated in part based on how people were perceived to smell. This is probably a case in which no amount of secondary literature can be as effective as a well-chosen image, such as the Progressive reformer Jacob Riis’ photos in How the Other Half Lives (1890), which I think most of us have already seen. Of course, it’s important for students to think about the non-visual aspects of urban life: the meaning of privacy in crowded and poorly sound-proofed tenements, the overwhelming stench of animal and human waste that pervaded most 19th-century cities, etc. It’s not Boston, but I love the Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew’s 1840 account London Labour and London Poor, with its encyclopedic descriptions of London’s sewers full of “dead dogs, cats, kittens, and rats; offal from the slaughter houses, sometimes even including the entrails of the animals; street pavement dirt of every variety; vegetable refuse, stable-dung; the refuse of pig-styes; night-soil; ashes; rotten mortar and rubbish of different kinds…” It’s a description that not only tells us about how things smelled, but how that smell reflected the way the built environment was used.
There are many more issues I hope to explore in a future blog post, but I’ll leave it there for now and ask people what they think. Have any of you found creative ways to help students think about the very alien urban spaces of the past?
Interesting stuff Justin. My musings on pedagogical theory inspired me to revisit some of my undergraduate educational psychology notes, and I feel a little indicted for not using more creative forms of assessment in the survey. Your idea of asking students to draw is a really interesting one and seems like you could use that for a lot of purposes. Drawing the differences between the architectural styles is one option, but also mapping the layouts of urban space through student-created illustrations might have great pedagogical utility. The act of manually recreating urban space could be a great way to reinforce the ways that the built environment creates and shapes social relationships.
I’ve recently starting experimenting with GIS programming, and it seems like your class would particularly lend itself to a collaborative GIS project.
One more thought–using google street view might be particularly useful for your course and enable your students to spend some time in Copley Square without crossing the continent.